Wyma Summer 2014
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FRONT MATTERS 1% Museum: The Guggenheim Goes Global CHLOE WYMA apartment complexes, “elite villas,” and twenty-nine hotels—including a “seven star” resort—to house visitors to the island. One evening this March, a bell rang out in Since it was announced in 2006, the the Guggenheim museum. A deluge of what Guggenheim’s multimillion-dollar deal with looked like thousands of dollar bills rained the Arab emirate’s Tourism Development down from the museum’s ramps onto the & Investment Company (TDIC) has been heads of puzzled museumgoers below. In an promoted under the auspices of cultural agitprop-style intervention reminiscent of pluralism. “Our commitment to interna- Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 stunt tional communication and global cultural on the trading fl oor of the New York Stock exchange—realized through our museums, Exchange, members of the activist art group collections, and programs—is inclusive,” Global Ultra Luxury Faction, or G.U.L.F., wrote then–Guggenheim Foundation dropped the fake bills in protest against director Thomas Krens in a press release: degrading labor conditions in distant Abu “The Guggenheim implicitly regards all Dhabi, where the Guggenheim is building a contemporary cultures and their traditions new satellite museum. The bills—inscribed as potential partners in the fi eld of aesthetic with slogans reading “What does an ethical discourse—we are both respectful of difference global museum look like?”—fi rst and foremost and excited by it.” implicated the museum in networks of labor As a 2009 Human Rights Watch report abuse halfway across the globe. But the action and subsequent investigations make clear, also shed light on the Guggenheim’s decades- however, this feel-good rhetoric of global long neoliberal turn. multiculturalism belies an altogether different Slated for completion in 2017, the Frank kind of “cultural exchange”—between the Gehry–designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Emirati government, Western cultural institu- will be the crown jewel of Saadiyat Island, tions, and the tens of thousands of migrant a $27-billion luxury property development laborers building the museum’s infrastructure. on a once-uninhabited sandbar just off the Foreigners account for close to 90 percent Abu Dhabi coastline. A cultural acropolis for of the UAE’s workforce, and Saadiyat is no the global elite, Saadiyat Island—or “Island exception. Under the UAE’s kafala sponsorship of Happiness” in Arabic—will also house system, migrant workers are beholden to their an offshore satellite of the Louvre Museum, employers for at least two years, unable to an NYU campus, a performing arts center, a leave the country or seek other employment; maritime museum, and the British Museum– in many cases, employers withhold their affi liated Zayed National Museum, consecrated passports. Young men from India, Pakistan, to the Emirati unifi er. Like the Guggenheim, Bangladesh, and other parts of South Asia these institutions will be housed in slick typically arrive in the UAE already indebted postmodern buildings bearing the brands of from recruitment and relocation fees paid international starchitects Jean Nouvel, Rafael to labor contracting agencies in their home Viñoly Beceiro, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, countries, which often deceive laborers about and Norman Foster. Sprinkled among these their wages and the terms of their contracts. bastions of liberal arts and culture will be two (Although UAE law requires the construction golf courses, three yacht-friendly marinas, and companies—not the workers—to pay relo- several shopping centers, as well as luxury cation and visa costs, these toothless regula- SUMMER 2014 DISSENT 5 FRONT MATTERS tions are widely ignored.) According to a contrary, investigators found that many December 2013 PricewaterhouseCoopers construction companies actually house report, 86 percent of Saadiyat workers said workers in cheaper camps in Abu Dhabi’s they paid fees to recruiters, though the actual industrial outskirts. In fact, the SAV operates statistics are likely higher. In March 2014 at less than half of its capacity, and yet Gulf representatives from Gulf Labor—a New Labor found two instances of workers being York–based coalition of artists and writers “promoted”—without pay increases—to super- campaigning for fair labor practices on visor positions so they could be relocated Saadiyat Island—surveyed workers at several from the SAV to cheaper off-island accom- labor camps across the island and surrounding modations. One such facility, documented area, all of whom reported paying recruitment by the Guardian, is located next to a sewage fees ranging from $1,000 to $3,900. “If there treatment plant and reeks of human waste. is a worker who said they have not paid a Another camp, built to accommodate workers recruitment fee, I would not believe him,” on the NYU campus (the only Saadiyat project an anonymous TDIC offi cial told Gulf Labor. not affi liated with TDIC), features open bath- Many workers had put up family land as rooms, unhygienic kitchens, and windowless collateral for their loans. And with base thirteen-by-fourteen-foot dormitories bunking salaries ranging from $177 to $245 per month, up to ten workers each. Investigators also it takes workers an average of two years—the turned up reports of a massive strike wave standard duration of a UAE work visa—to pay last year that culminated in the deportation of back their recruitment debt. hundreds of workers. According to offi cial doctrine, all workers In 2011 Gulf Labor announced an inter- assigned to TDIC projects live in the Saadiyat national boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Accommodation Village, a sprawling camp Dhabi. Dozens of artists, curators, and writers built to house 20,000 laborers. Designed as a immediately signed on, and the petition now showpiece for foreign dignitaries and a palli- has close to 2,000 signatures. (The affi liated ative against human rights concerns, the SAV Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU has drafted a boasts photogenic amenities including cricket similar petition targeting the university.) This grounds, a chess center, a coffee shop, and year Gulf Labor’s newly formed direct-action a library. No doubt TDIC hopes to mitigate wing—the Global Ultra Luxury Faction—has the fact that workers housed in the SAV are created a PR nightmare for the Guggenheim. effectively quarantined from urban life in Abu On the opening weekend of its Italian Dhabi. Futurism exhibit this February, G.U.L.F. Moreover, despite TDIC’s claims to the dropped fl yers and unfurled banners bearing Courtesy of Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) 6 DISSENT SUMMER 2014 FRONT MATTERS the slogans “Wage Theft” and “1% Museum” The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is the latest from the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramps. The development in the museum’s gradual trans- following month, G.U.L.F. projected similar formation from temple of modernism to messages onto the Guggenheim’s Fifth Avenue neoliberal art franchise. Established in 1939 as the “Museum of Non-Objective Painting,” the Guggenheim was designed to refl ect the universal and transcendent aesthetics The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is the latest of European abstraction. In 1959 Frank development in the museum’s gradual Lloyd Wright’s signature inverted ziggurat building—conceived as a “monument to transformation from temple of modernism Modernism” and a “temple of the spirit”—was to neoliberal art franchise. publicly unveiled. For decades, the institution and its time-capsule architecture remained a bastion of midcentury aesthetic uplift. But over time, it has also become the icon of a facade and launched a parody website, global brand. globalguggenheim.org, which describes The fi rst push overseas came in 1976, when the Guggenheim as “a vital cultural center, museum director Thomas Messer convinced an educational institution, and the heart of Peggy Guggenheim to bequeath her eighteenth- an international network of museums built century Venetian palazzo and its collection of specifi cally for the winners of global economic modern art to her uncle’s namesake foundation. inequality.” A few weeks later came the dollar However, it was Messer’s successor, Thomas bill stunt. Then, over Memorial Day weekend, Krens, who reconfi gured the museum as a G.U.L.F. staged yet another intervention global enterprise. The Guggenheim, he told the at the Italian Futurism exhibit: alongside New York Times in 1992, is the “one museum in Umberto Boccioni’s belligerent abstractions New York City that is a specialist in interna- and Mario Chiattone’s techno-utopian archi- tional outlook . the possibility for expanding tectural drawings, protesters hung their own international programming [is] extraordinary.” geometric, Futurist-infl ected artworks, embla- Yet this expansion got off to a rocky start. zoned with militant slogans like “Into the Krens’s fi rst major venture beyond the Upper Future with Worker Dignity!” East Side, the ill-fated Guggenheim SoHo, Throughout G.U.L.F.’s protests, the opened in 1992 and was discreetly shut- museum’s administration has maintained that tered within a decade. Meanwhile, a dubious construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi proposal to build a museum inside a mountain has not yet begun, but G.U.L.F. has argued in Salzburg, Austria languished after locals that signifi cant progress toward establishing expressed concerns over its feasibility and the museum—including work on surrounding environmental impact. infrastructure and the purchase of some 250 In 1997 the Guggenheim fi nally struck artworks by art stars including El Antsui, gold in the Basque city of Bilbao, until then Yayoi Kusama, and Douglas Wheeler—has less known for contemporary art than for been made. And G.U.L.F. has pointed out that separatist terrorism and postindustrial blight. Saadiyat’s cosmopolitan appeal rests in no The municipality saw, in the Guggenheim small part on the cachet of the Guggenheim name and Frank Gehry’s trophy building, an brand.